Court has broken down the figures into two groups: men whose avatars were of their faces, and those whose avatars consisted of, er, other parts of the anatomy. Or, as he calls it; “the headless torso demographic”.

Interestingly, the “headless torso demographic” voted for independence, with 51% of the vote going to yes.

Some Grindr users – the app describes itself as “the largest and most popular all-male location-based social network out there”– seemed somewhat perplexed to be asked about their stance on politics.

Photograph: machotrouts.tumblr.com

Many, however, seemed more than happy to give an answer, or engage in debate:

Twitter also tipped towards a yes result. The Twitter government account collated hashtag data and mentions. More than 1.55m hashtags related to the yes campaign have been tweeted since 5 August, against 500,000 related to no. Below is a real-time graph of tweets relating to the referendum campaign:

The prevalence of support for yes on social media isn’t too surprising, given social media’s popularity with the 16-24 demographic – younger votes are overwhelmingly thought to have voted yes. This contrasts with traditional polling companies, who frequently quiz people via telephone. Older people, who are no voters on the whole, are more likely to have landlines.

It’s clear that social media and mobile apps could play a huge part in future political polling – and should do. Waracle Ltd created the Referend-um app to exactly this end; it’s just a shame it didn’t work as well as it should have done. Or work at all. It’s the prototype of polling though. That, and maybe Grindr.